Palm Readings at Sunset

The tattoo on her palm had faded to the color of a dying sunset. Sarah traced it with her thumb—the running horse she'd gotten at twenty-two, when the future still felt like something you could outrun.

Now she was thirty-eight, standing in the produce aisle of a Trader Joe's at 7 PM on a Tuesday, holding an orange that cost more than her first car's monthly payment. The cashier, a boy with acne and eyes that hadn't yet learned to mask disappointment, scanned her items with the efficient cruelty of the underpaid.

"That'll be forty-two eighty-seven."

Sarah's palm sweated against the credit card. Forty-two dollars for dinner alone. She'd spent her twenties running from this moment, this particular flavor of loneliness that came wrapped in organic packaging and tax-exempt status. Her mother had warned her, in that tone mothers use when they're predicting their daughters' failures: 'You're too picky. You're running out of time.'

The cashier bagged her oranges. Three of them, because somewhere she'd read that vitamin C helped with the kind of exhaustion no amount of sleep could fix.

"Have a good night, ma'am."

Ma'am. The word landed like a small stone in her stomach.

She walked to her car, the oranges heavy in her palm. A streetlight flickered overhead, bathing the parking lot in that peculiar orange glow that makes everything look like a photograph from the 1970s. Her phone buzzed—Mark, texting from three time zones away. 'I saw your sister's post. You guys look happy.'

She'd run to the opposite coast to escape him, but geography had turned out to be as effective at outrunning memory as running on a treadmill.

The oranges sat on the passenger seat like small, patient suns. Sarah peeled one in the car, letting the juice run down her wrist. Cititus sharp and bright, it tasted like the summer she'd turned thirty and realized there was no finish line, only more running.

She started the engine. Her palm left a sticky print on the steering wheel. Somewhere in the distance, palm trees swayed against the orange-dark sky, indifferent and beautiful.